Conditions for Digital Innovation

Session 2.1

Prof. Bodong Chen
cbd@upenn.edu

Penn GSE

March 22, 2024

Agenda

  • What’s happening in the field?
  • Upcoming Assignment: Design Project
  • Conditions for Digital Innovation: People
    • Mini lecture
    • Group Work
  • BREAK
  • Lightning Talks #1
  • Conditions for Digital Innovation: Artifacts, Tools
    • Mini lecture
    • Group Work
  • BREAK
  • Lightning Talks #2
  • Plenary Discussion

What’s happening in the field?

you.com

you.com

(cont’d)

Video

NVIDIA Project GR00T

“Why Chatbots Are Not the Future”

  • Text inputs have no affordances
  • Prompts are just a pile of context
  • Responses are isolated
  • The implementation—evaluation loop (is lengthy)

What’s on your radar?

Upcoming Assignment: Design Project

Assessment components

  • Participation (30%)
  • Bio Sketch & Reflection (20%)
  • Artifact/Innovation Analysis (10%)
  • Design Project (40%)
  • Awareness and inspiration
  • Views on learning
  • Innovations “in the wild”
  • Design an innovation for learning

Upcoming Assignment: Design Project

Description

  • For your final project you will design a multi-faceted digital innovation for a learning context of your choice. This is an opportunity to envision and enact your views on learning and how it can be supported by digital innovation.
  • Your project needs to address an enduring problem in education.
  • Your project needs to have a digital innovation component – which can be broadly defined – and has a clear plan of engaging stakeholders.
  • There is no page limit on the final document and you can use multimedia formats (e.g., interactive demo, story map, audiovisual essay) – so long as it contains key components of your design project (more details below).

Upcoming Assignment: Design Project

Key components

  • Description of the context,
  • Problem statement (current status and gaps),
  • Perspectives on learning,
  • Proposed digital innovation, and
  • Plans of engaging stakeholders at different stages of the innovation

Upcoming Assignment: Design Project

Dates and milestones

  • April 12: Submit a draft document with key components
  • April 19: Share work-in-progress design solution with peers
  • May 10: Final design project due

Conditions for Digital Innovation for Learning

Factors in the System: People, Artifacts, Tools

Anchor texts:

  • Teachers as agents of change (Ertmer & Ottenbreit-Leftwich, 2010)

  • Salient factors affecting technology innovations (Zhao et al., 2002)

Teachers

Problems facing teachers

  • Teachers use roughly the same tools
  • Teachers’ use of technology are rarely linked to student outcomes
  • Technology use is typically not linked with powerful pedagogies but traditional instruction
  • Teacher PD always lags behind

Teacher change for technology integration

Knowledge

TPACK – technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge

Teacher change for technology integration

Self-efficacy & Pedagogical Beliefs

1

Teacher change for technology integration

Pedagogical Beliefs

1

Conditions

The Innovation, Innovator, and Context

The Innovation

  • Distance from school culture
  • Distance from existing practice
  • Distance from available technological resources
  • Dependence on others (people)
  • Dependence on technological resources

The Context

  • Human infrastructure
  • Technological infrastructure
  • Social support

Tech innovations in informal settings

Libraries

Tech innovations in informal settings

Libraries

Tech innovation in informal settings

Museums

Group Discussion

Choose one specific digital innovation your table is interested in.

Discuss:

  1. Who are the main agents of change (e.g., teachers, librians)?
  2. How far is the distance between the innovation and existing practice?
  3. What support the change agents would need to effectively incorporate the innnovation?

Record your ideas on FigJam: https://bit.ly/eden-jam-2403
(Password: eden)

Lightning Talks: Panel #1

Google Slides

Factors in the System: People, Artifacts, Tools

Anchor text: Roschelle et al. (1999)

Software Components, End-user Programming

A Dilemma

  • Developers lack the contact hours with students to directly create excellent educational software
  • Educators are not efficient producers of educational software

Software Components, End-user Programming

Their Vision

In the future, ideas for specific educational activities will be turned into software as easily as writing a document: The development process will be replaced by a process of editing, creating, and manipulating “editable applications.” Such applications will consist of high-level computational objects that are available as tangible building blocks.

Software Components, End-user Programming

Levers

  • Support user programming for just-in-time adaptation of components

  • Provide cognitive support for educators to manage wiring complexity

Software Components, End-user Programming

Then

In JavaBeans (like many other component models), components interoperate by being “wired” together; wires specify the paths along which data and control can flow.

Now

In GPTs (like many other component models), components interoperate by being “wired” together; wires specify the paths along which data and control can flow.

Let’s Talk “Wiring”

  • What’s involved in this kind of wiring – of JavaBeans, GPTs, different tech tools?
  • Wiring based on what?
  • Who is in the position to do the wiring?
  • What support do they need?

New Types of Teacher Knowledge

TPACK in the age of ChatGPT and GenAI1

“GenAI requires a philosophical shift in TPACK from viewing technology as a tool to recognizing the emergent, reciprocal dance between users and technologies like GenAI.”

“Contextual Knowledge (XK) must expand in scope. While XK traditionally focuses on constraints within school systems, it must now also consider broader personal, cultural, political, and ethical implications of AI over decades-long timescales. These include impacts on notions of truth, trust in institutions, mental health, and workforce disruption that schools will need to address.”

New Types of Relationship

Trustworthy AI Engages Humans as Partners

Issues for human-AI partnership in education:

  1. Comprehension – a shared human-AI understanding of learning as a phenomenon
  2. Communication – the ability for human and AI partners to discuss this understanding of learning in relation to particular learners in real time
  3. Co-decision and coordination – engaging human and AI partners to make collaborative decisions

AI & E: 2024 AI Summit Dr. June Ahn Spark Talk

Group Discussion

Choose one or two specific digital learning trends your table is interested in.

Discuss:

  1. What specific intentions for education are valued or amplified? What intentions could/should be valued more?
  2. How do “users” and “developers” interact with each other, if at all? How can you characterise their relationship?
  3. How may “users” be empowered to contribute to the inonvation?

Record your ideas on FigJam: https://bit.ly/eden-jam-2403
(Password: eden)

Lightning Talks: Panel #2

Google Slides

Plenary Discussion

EDEN 5050